In the meantime, I have a pallet garden up and planted, though I did manage to scrape some skin off with bad staple gun ergonomics. There are strawberry plants, some beans that I desperately hope are bush, not pole, and the bottom layer is sweet alyssum because there are both dogs and free-roaming cats in my neighborhood.

It’s a bad time of year for it, but I have a new plant growing–a pomegranate, to be precise. After several years of failed attempts, one of the pomegranate seeds I stuck in the dirt has sprouted; it has its two baby leaves and is about an inch and a half tall.

Web consensus seems to be that pomegranates will grow in just about any soil, and that they are drought-tolerant but need good watering for the fruit to set properly. I’m going to have to get a largish pot; it gets too cold around here for the plant to live outside all winter, so it’s going to have to be transportable (at least until I have a spot to build a greenhouse on). As they’re self-pollinating, I don’t need to have two plants, which is good because I doubt I have space for two small trees in my house. Even with one I’m going to have to do some bonsai, I expect.

Anyway, I’m psyched. If I grow my own pomegranates, I don’t have to have them shipped from California.

One of the problems I’ve had with growing anything in my back courtyard is the fact that, despite the name, dirt is not dirt cheap. I could build a couple of beds for pretty cheap, but then I’d need dirt to put in them.

But across the alley they’re putting in a garage in a spot that was landscaped to hell and gone (I’m kind of sad that the trees are coming out, but I can see why they’d rather have a garage), and there was a whole dumpster full of dirt last night.

Took me about a half an hour to come up with ~ten cubic feet of pretty nice topsoil, though I had to have help moving the containers afterwards. I’m going to go out when I’m feeling more ambitious and check whether they’ve taken the dumpster away yet, but even if they have I’m not going to be sad. I have enough dirt to get started with in the spring.